Hey guys- sorry this took so long- again.
Thanks for the reviews- much appreciated. This is fairly short but I've got the rest sort of planned out so there should be new chapters up fairly quickly. Please review- I loves reviews :D
She stared blankly into the wall, eyes fixated upon burning themselves out. She was so tired, and the hunger inside of her was consuming. By standing there, staring into the wall, depriving herself of any comfort, she could almost trick herself into believing that she was actually feeling something real, instead of an echo of a want for physical comfort that she recognised but ignored.
She's spent the morning in her lawyers office, divorce papers clasped in shaking hands so tightly that it had been an effort to pry them away. Hidden in an innocuous brown envelope, slightly creased at the edges, they could have been anything, deceptively harmless. In reality, they were the end of her world.
She's picked them up over a month ago, insurance she'd told herself. Her husband had become a ghost, a shadow that no longer responded to her in any way. They'd talked, but his voice was either heavy with weariness of thick with anger. Nothing she said got through to him, and nights of eating take away alone in the front room and falling asleep in front of the television, waiting for him, were tearing at her. She tried, patiently praying he'd come back to her, would find her on the couch and take her back. But instead she spent morning after morning waking up with cramp and shivering in the coldness of another night spent alone.
Automatically, she had presumed that he was cheating on her, not because that was what she thought, but because that was what she had expected since the first morning she had woken up with her fingers lost in his dark hair and his eyes regarding her with tears buried in them. More often than not, she'd find him asleep in their room, instinct driving him there in his exhaustion when he was unable to do anything else.
Tear stained face would rub against him as she joined him for a few hours, and although she'd wake to his arm about her, it was more through habit than anything else. Misery grew, and although there was hope, a new job away from CTU, she had needed something to draw strength from. The divorce papers had given her that, although she had no intention of filling them in, they were a reassurance that there was a way out if need be, that she could just leave.
But sitting in her lawyer's office on the uncomfortably comfortable chair under the blindingly bright lights and oppressive cheeriness that seemed to want to force its way into her, the divorce papers were the last thing in the world from which she could draw strength, instead it seemed to ebb away from her into the envelope as she placed it on the black desk that so much resembled the one that used to be her husbands. Broken, if she could have described herself that would have been the only word she would have used.
But all that was hidden, a smiling front chatting with the lawyer as they discussed some ridiculously unimportant matter that Michelle wasn't even sure she listened too. She'd fled quickly, a dignified walk that suggested all was well, fingers unconsciously brushing away the tears that she was refusing to let fall.
CTU had been better, the gloom of it more acceptable to her eyes, her body more willing to function when her surroundings matched her mood. That was at least until she decided to actually do some work, a remedy to endlessly searching her mind for all her faults, for all the ways in which she failed him, a remedy for condemning herself as the evil person she inevitably was.
The first thing she did was enough to freeze her completely- leaving her staring into a wall, trying desperately to burn her eyes into it, to bring it down, to do anything because the helplessness she was drowning in was overpowering everything else, and yet still she couldn't feel anything.
This was why she should have left, should have run as fast as she could. They gave her an out, why in hell did she not take. She could have just accepted, a pension, large enough to live off, she didn't need much anyway, there was only her; she would have been ok, and she wouldn't have to go through any of this.
She hadn't seem him since she'd asked him for a divorce, he'd been all she'd seen, but she hadn't actually seen him. And she couldn't not now, not after what she'd done. She should have just left.